1. Saturday's Celebration of Life left me happily wrung out today. I'd been anxious about this gathering, it was an emotional afternoon, and, while I love being with people, especially friends I've known my whole life, doing a lot of socializing makes me tired. I've written about this quite a bit. It comes from being a more introverted than extroverted person. I don't have bad feelings about being with a lot of people, but afterward I need time to myself and need to deal with fatigue. The fatigue hit me today and I had a fairly slow Sunday.
2. At a very important juncture in the cattle drive, which is at the center of Lonesome Dove, a character essential to the success of the book's cattle drive gets killed.
The other men on the cattle drive have great affection for this character and grief saturates the entirety of the crew.
My guess is that readers of Lonesome Dove also have great respect and affection for this character and, for me, at least, it raises the question as to why Larry McMurtry would write his getting killed into the story's plot.
I don't know yet.
I do know that losing this character creates a huge gap in the operation of this cattle drive to Montana. It means that less capable men are going to have to step up and do the jobs this character did.
It means, as often is the case in great stories, that this character's death, I would think, will become a test for the mettle of the men on this drive and I will be reading with curiosity to see how or if the cattle drive succeeds with him gone.
I'm guessing here, but while readers might get attached to characters, authors can't be guided in their storytelling by their readers' affections. The plot and what the author feels it demands has to determine what does and doesn't happen. The plot in Lonesome Dove has been, through the 700+pages I've read, a complicated series of tests of a variety of characters in a variety of situations. Some characters have been killed and my response, at least, was good riddance. And sometimes the killing of these characters was a test that the characters who did the killing had to face and had to decide what to do.
As I read the last just over 100 pages of this book, I'm eager to see what tests lie ahead and how the surviving characters respond to them, especially in the absence of the character they just grievously lost.
3. Carol had announced to us that we'd be having grilled chicken for family dinner tonight and she assigned me to make a salad.
I decided to make a Mediterranean couscous salad that blended couscous, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, cilantro, parsley, and basil. I also added a tin of Trader Joe's chickpeas with cumin and parsley and the juice of a whole lemon.
It worked.
So did the chicken breasts topped with pineapple and a slice of Swiss cheese that Paul grilled. So did the lemon rice side dish Christy brought. So did the bacon and butter green beans that Carol prepared. We had some pickled items to start and Carol served homemade limoncello for dessert.
I ate a Hershey chocolate bar.
We read to each other again tonight. Paul assigned us to bring something we enjoyed reading as elementary school students.
I didn't have any childhood books on hand, like the Hardy Boys, but I was an avid reader of baseball game recaps and box scores as a kid.
So, on the NYTimes Time Machine I found the write up of the game on July 3, 1966 when Atlanta's Tony Cloninger, a pitcher, blasted two grand slam home runs against the Giants. I read the write up sixty years ago in the Spokesman Review before I delivered the Review on my paper route. I was so shocked by Cloninger's achievement and that it had happened against my beloved Giants, that it seemed a good recap to read aloud, even if I had to do so from a Times article and not the Review.
Christy read a passage from a book she loved sixty years ago entitled The Velvet Room. It moved her to fantasize and dream about finding a room in an abandoned mansion line with a velvet curtained room featuring bookshelves fully stocked with books where the story's main character could escape the indignities of the Great Depression and be by herself and read, read, read.
Carol read a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle story featuring a girl who wouldn't take a bath and woke up one morning with radish plants growing out of the dirt that had caked on her arms and face during the time she refused to bathe. Mrs. Hitzel read our third grade class a bunch of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stories and Christy also read them to her students at Pinehurst Elementary School (and others?).
Paul didn't have a copy of the book that enchanted him as a child, but he told us all about David and the Pheonix and his love for reading books when he was a youngster.
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